This is not a drill.

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Monthly Archives: September 2018

It’s hard to get started lately. Hard to start the day. Hard to start tasks other than ones I know that people would notice if I skipped. Hard to start making changes that would probably be helpful. I don’t know where to point myself or what words to use. The order of things gets scrambled and I wander off into dream-land rather than trying to untangle and clean up the messes I keep making.

I find myself wandering not just mentally but physically as well. Detours on routes I’m meant to be traveling. Wasting time and gas driving around looking for places I don’t need to go. I have no stake in these places. My brain is just always fishing for something to do other than what I really ought to be doing, and I don’t always have the ability to rein it back in, to stick to the path.

Part of this is down to my body adjusting to being (medically approved) off meds. Neither of the two meds I was on were working for me anymore – one was giving me panic attacks and the other one was making me wish I was dead (no planning, just the general ‘everyone would be better off without me’ feeling), in addition to causing some pretty serious gastric issues. So, over the course of the last few months, I’ve been working on getting off both meds. It will take some time for things to chemically settle back down in the brain meats, and I respect that.

Part of it is also big changes in routine. My partner found a job after almost six months of being unemployed. It’s a wonderful thing and I’m very happy about it, but it has also come with some scheduling turmoil for us and the hound. We’re still trying to get used to new time constraints, new traffic patterns, etc. Big changes aren’t easy for anybody, but when you’re someone who needs daily routines as anchors in order to not feel utterly untethered and overwhelmed, it’s particularly hard. There are things I can do to help with this, of course: stuff like giving myself a hard bedtime and wake time, doing meal prep on the weekends so that we have dinner stuff we can quickly throw together on weeknights, and making dog training time mandatory rather than optional (which is good for both him AND me). But, knowing what needs doing and actually doing it are often very different things in my world.

True to form, I don’t know where I was going with this and I don’t really know how to end it. I guess I just wanted to try and get back into the habit of writing even when there’s nothing really obvious to write about, because that’s supposedly how one becomes a better writer. Or something.

Sunset at the lake last Friday. I went to the store for ice cream and ended up at the town beach. At least I remembered I had ice cream in the car and didn’t stay long enough to let it melt.

OCD brain is annoyed that there are more than three candles in this picture. Calm your tits, OCD brain. We’ll just assume those blurry, far-away candles are for future blogiversaries off in the misty distance. Or past ones from other blogs. Who cares, just make like Elsa and let it go already. Gahd.

It doesn’t feel like that big of a deal to me because I’ve actually had a blog of some sort for close to fourteen years now. My original blog, which technically still exists but is pretty hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for, was started on 1/13/2004. I finally gave up posting there in 2009, then started my half-assed cooking blog in 2010. The half-assed cooking blog also still exists but I haven’t posted on it since July 2015. It was starting to feel like a chore, and it was also making me feel really inadequate in a lot of ways. Like, food blogs are all about good photography, and I had neither the time or the inclination to teach myself how to be a food stylist. I’m also really not good at measuring when I’m cooking, and I don’t always think in a linear fashion, so recipes are pretty hard for me to write…and that’s pretty much what people read food blogs for. There are only so many times someone is going to want to read about how good my meatloaf is before they’re like “OK, prove it. Either feed me meatloaf, give me your recipe so I can try it, or STFU”. In the end, I opted for S’ing the F.U.

I started How Bad Can It Go because a friend drew some casual similarities between my then Facebook-based rants about being a little touched in the head and the way Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess) wrote about her own experiences with mental illness. The comparison was wildly flattering. I immediately started envisioning how I’d blog hilariously (but also earnestly) about my struggles with anxiety, depression, and ADHD for maybe a year or so, then be ‘discovered’ by some publisher. I’d be given a book deal and afforded the opportunity to tell my day job they could shove off.

Let’s just say the offers haven’t exactly been pouring in. Or trickling, even. Nary a drip. Not even the merest hint of moisture in the air. Dry as a 5,000 year old Egyptian’s desiccated, mummified femur buried under 47 feet of sand, in fact.

Ramses was the worst peek-a-boo partner EVER.

But that’s OK. I’ll keep on keepin’ on, because hey, how bad can it go?